Ah me, the spondee. I was hoping to get around that one... But I see you caught me trying to sneak the adjective past to avoid the noun!
The issue, for me, is one of terminology rather than meter itself. (And it is why the Greek terms can leave me a bit leary.)
I don't find the notion of feet all that useful to the working poet. Rather, I'm a "boom counter" if you will. Five beats to the pentameter. Five "feet" leaves you open to all sorts of problems. Can you count two unstressed syllables--or even three--in a row as a foot? Can you count three stressed syllables in a row as one foot? Well, as far as I'm concerned, no. (Or rather, I don't find it practical.) But as far as some scholars are concerned, yes. There are names for such animals--the molossus, for example!--to prove it.
I think the concept of pyrrhic as a "meter" in English, for instance, is pretty obviously suspect if you sit down and try to imagine such a thing as pyrrhic tetrameter. You can't, because there ain't. English just won't allow it.
But the confusion about all this is from transfering wily-nily terminology for a quantitative system to an accentual syllabic system. In Greek (or Latin), a spondee is two long syllables. A pyrrhic is three short syllables. But "ictus"--the metrical beat (actually the point where the foot was put down in dancing--the downbeat)--ALSO played a role. (Some people forget this when discussing quantitative meters.)
Actually, often the Greek terminology translates just fine. Iamb is as good a name for dah DUM as any. And trochee works fine for DUM dah. Or anapest for dah dah DUM. I use these terms myself.
But--the spondee. I think the confusion arrises because in English, folks use it to describe what I would consider TWO DIFFERENT effects. I would maintain that one of these effects is rhythmic rather than metrical. Two heavy (long, if you will) syllables that still count as one foot--or that, for me, still get one downbeat--even though they almost feel equivalent in weight. I consider this spondaic in rhythm. As far as I am concerned, they are spondaic iambs (oxymoronic as that may sound at first). And it is a wonderful, rich effect. But I still give it one "beat." And the foot counters still consider it one foot. This is what your "damn art" is in my book, though it is in a way trying to be the other kind of "spondee" at the same time.
The other effect is sometimes called a double iamb. Two unstressed syllables followed by two stressed syllables. This sort of spondee cannot really exist on its own, as far as I know. It seems to need the pyrrhic. (Again, the idea--and this was discussed at greater length in the loose iamb thread--that in a duple meter in English you can't have three unstressed beats in a row.) But either way you slice it--as a pyrrhic and spondee, say (which for me feels like an artifical intellectual division, however useful it may be to scholars), or as an anapest and perhaps the start of a trochee--it is TWO FEET. And it gets TWO BEATS. This is the only thing I would actually call a spondee. And again, it is really part of a composite foot. If one went by feet. Which I don't.
Your poem flows in very accomplished, smooth, standard accentual syllabic pentameter up to the line in question. You just about carry it off, actually--I can see a reader persuaded to read it as you intend--but it is as if you are suddenly jolting into another system of scansion. I think you could get away with it in a much looser and less traditional pentameter. But as you are working so much in the traditional iambic line (eking secondary stresses out, for instance, puts you VERY much in that tradition rather than an accentual one), the anomoly comes off as---an anomoly. One could argue that it also comes in at an emphatically emotional point in the poem, and that the anomoly is earned. I guess that is another issue.
In an accentual meter, all bets are off, though. (But as you know, your poem is not accentual.) The idea of feet goes totally out of the window, and, yes, stressed syllables can rub shoulders much more easily. Take:
Three blind mice (beat, beat, beat)
See how they run (beat, beat, off, beat)
The truth is, though, even in nursery rimes, there is often a combination of the accentual with something more like accentual syllabic:
they all ran after the farmer's wife
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
I think in the other thread, these sorts of strong-rhythmic song-like poems were referred to as logoaedic rather than accentual. I'm not sure my grasp of the definition of "logoaedic" is terribly firm, though.
And I love the Gwendolyn Brooks "We Real Cool", which may be unique in English verse for having EVERY syllable a stressed beat. (THough to call it molossian monometer, or some such, would be laughable. I'd just call it a trimeter.)
And, to be honest, I think the longer a line in English, the more it is going to lean toward the accentual syllabic rather than the purely accentual. Or the accentual gets harder to maintain.
Anyway, sorry to ramble. And I know some folks disagree with me on this one. (I think in some ways my concept of meter is idiosyncratic, or at least heterodox.) And it may be all stuff you already knew/have heard before.
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